* EVERYBODY NEEDS A HERO *

My Hero:
JONATHAN CHAPMAN
a.k.a. Johnny Appleseed
b.1774 - d.1845

THE LEGEND OF JOHNNY APPLESEED

If you had stood on a bright sunny day
some one-hundred years ago, by the banks
of the Ohio River, you might have seen a
strange procession coming down stream.
You would have seen two birch-bark canoes
securely lashed together
& piled high with leathern bags
brimming full of appleseeds, and in the midst
of the strange craft, a small wiry man with
long dark hair, keen black eyes, & a scanty beard
that had never known a razor.
On his head rested a tin dipper,
& his body was clad in tattered garments
that had once done duty as coffee-sacks.

Whenever the children
in front of some lone frontier cabin
glimpsed this queer sight, they rushed inside
& announced with glee:

"Oh mother, Johnny Appleseed's coming;
may we go down to the river & meet him when he lands?"

Although the visitor was as odd a specimen of humanity
as the wilderness afforded, he was known as one of the
kindliest of men, & no one was afraid of him.

When Johnny came ashore
he would look about him for soil
that was rich & loamy,
& then he would begin to plant
his appleseeds. Sometimes
he would cover considerable tracts,
putting in as many as 16 bushels of seeds to the acre.
He would stay as long as his stock of seed held out,
& then would disappear
as unceremoniously as he had come,
only to return after a few weeks
or months with another load.

He never forgot the orchards he had planted.
When the trees were partly grown, he returned to
prune them year after year, & to repair the
slight bush fences he had built to keep out the deer
& other animals that might nip the tender sprouts.

Many of the trees
he disposed of to farmers for transplanting,
& in some cases he would sell
an entire orchard on the spot
he had originally chosen.
If the customer was poor,
as most of the pioneers were,
he could have the trees for nothing,
or Johnny would take
any old piece of clothing in exchange.
If a customer wanted to to buy,
the price of each tree was invariably
a "fippenny-bit",
and immediate payment was never required.
Johnny usually took a note from the customer,
& of such promises-to-pay
he collected a goodly number during his career,
but it is not on record
that he ever tried to collect any of them,
apparently considering, like Mr. Micawber,
that the transaction was completed
when the note was written.

When he could not travel by water, he went on foot,
carrying his precious seeds in leathern bags
slung across his back.
Occasionally he would press into service
some decrepid horse that he had saved
from cruel treatment by purchasing it
with his slender income.
Every autumn he would start out in a
diligent search of the woods & clearings of such strays
& cast-offs, that he might care for them till they died
of old age, or he could transfer them to some new owner;
the second condition of the transfer
being humane treatment.
Johnny never sold any of the poor old nags he had collected.

Besides appleseeds,
Johnny planted seeds of many medicinal herbs
in the woods through which he traveled.
doctors were few and far between in the wilderness,
& Johnny wished to make up for this lack
as far as he could. By his efforts hundreds of miles
of forests were carpeted with fennel, catnip, horehound,
pennyroyal, rattlesnake root, & other of the "simples"
that our ancestors used in sickness.

Johnny was always ready to talk with friends
or strangers on high themes.
His own little library of books,
purchased with that part of his income not given away
or used to relieve suffering, was freely lent to all
who would take the books an read them.

When his whole supply of books gave out,
he would divide two or three of them into pieces
and leave one chapter at each farm,
to remain till his next visit, when he would exchange it,
for another chapter. The only difficulty with that scheme
was that the readers rarely got the chapters
in the proper order, but that troubles neither them
nor their queer librarian.

- HIS LOVE OF NATURE -

No one could have been more tender
to all forms of animal life than Johnny Appleseed.
In this respect he reminds us of good Saint Francis of Assisi,
with his appreciation of all nature as God's worlds,
& the birds as man's little brothers.

On one occasion
he even put out his campfire that the smoke
might not destroy the myriads of mosquitoes
which hovered near it.
Another time he found that a bear & her cubs
were asleep in a hollow log
against which he had built his fire,
so not wishing to disturb them,
he quenched the flame & slept that night in the snow.
A rattlesnake once struck him,
& he killed the venomous creature;
an action he always after regretted.

"Poor fellow," said Johnny, "He only touched me,
while I, in an ungodly passion,
put the heel of my scythe through him & went home."
Surely a kind heart beat beneath this man's coffee-sacks;
if he had lived in the early centuries,
the painters would have drawn
the tin dipper on his head as a halo.

His journeyings over Ohio & Indiana,
carrying his bag of appleseeds & his tattered books,
continued till the very week of his death.
When he was taken sick
in the home of a settler in Fort Wayne,
he was on his way to repair the fence
about an orchard he had set out some years before
near the western frontier of the state.

The pioneers in a large section of the Middle West
mourned him as one of the strangest,
but one of the best friends they had.
It was estimated that he had left behind
fully one-hundred-thousand, acres of orchards,
planted as a testimony to his love,
for nature & for his fellowman.

Who was he? Who was Johnny Appleseed?

His real name was Jonathan Chapman,
& he was born in Boston in 1774.

He had followed the Revolutionary War veterans
over the Allegheny Mountains,
& conceiving his life mission
to be the planting of apple trees,
as theirs was the wielding of the axe
or the guiding of the plow,
he served a great & useful purpose
making men & women
contented in their new homes on the frontier.

No one knows just where his body is buried,
but no one doubts
that it is somewhere in the woods he loved;
where the birds sing & the squirrels play,
& where the breezes of spring waft the sweet odors
of blossoming branches.

There is an old poem
that some children learn one verse of,
which runs:

"And if they inquire whence came such trees,
Where not a bough once swayed in the breeze,
The reply still comes as they travel on..."

"Those trees were planted by Appleseed John."

- Thanks to Frank B. McAllister -

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